Eye Controlled Media: Present and Future State
This paper is written in spring 1995 by
Theo Engell-Nielsen
and
Arne John Glenstrup as a final thesis
of our minor subject:
Information
Psychology
(HCI).
The paper is available in electronic form as a
hypertext document, a
PDF document, and a
gzipped PostScript File.
Abstract
Today, the human eye-gaze can be recorded by relatively unobtrusive
techniques. This thesis argues that it is possible to use the eye-gaze
of a computer user in the interface to aid the control of the
application. Care must be taken, though, that eye-gaze tracking data is
used in a sensible way, since the nature of human eye-movements is a
combination of several voluntary and involuntary cognitive processes.
The main reason for eye-gaze based user interfaces being attractive is
that the direction of the eye-gaze can express the interests of the
user-it is a potential porthole into the current cognitive
processes-and communication through the direction of the eyes is faster
than any other mode of human communication. It is argued that eye-gaze
tracking data is best used in multimodal interfaces where the user
interacts with the data instead of the interface, in so-called
non-command user interfaces. Furthermore, five usability criteria for
eye-gaze media are given.
This thesis also suggests research into a new, interactive film medium:
interest and emotion sensitive media (IES). IES exploits the viewer's
eye-gaze and other affection measures to determine how script paths of an
IES film are traversed. IES will be very difficult to implement today,
as research is needed to investigate temporal problems in script
construction, how multiple persons can use IES, how activation areas are
constructed and how the producer of an IES film is best assisted in
writing the script.
This thesis also contains reviews of current technical possibilities,
psychological aspects of eye-gaze tracking and current eye-gaze based
systems.
Arne John Glenstrup
<panic@diku.dk>
Last updated July 11, 2006